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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23932591">Iced Eyes</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitecompositions/pseuds/yetanotheryetagain'>yetanotheryetagain (infinitecompositions)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Criminal Minds (US TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Childhood Trauma, Established Relationship, F/M, Female Spencer Reid - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Long-Term Relationships, Murder, Red Room, Reid was raised in the Red Room</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:14:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>8,073</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23932591</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/infinitecompositions/pseuds/yetanotheryetagain</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek didn't see it when he met her, he saw it later. </p><p>When Spencer Reid, when Sveta, was back there, she went cold.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Derek Morgan/Spencer Reid</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>124</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Iced Eyes</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When Derek first hooked up with Spencer – and don’t get him wrong, that’s exactly what it was, and for all her awkwardness Spencer had been on the same page on that and so oddly comfortable with it – the last thing he expected was to walk out to the kitchen in the morning to see a man built like a goddamn warehouse in the kitchen, red lines on his face from some sort of mask and a helpless but violent look in his eyes. He had been too busy trying to remember what it was that had bothered him when they were together the night before, and he nearly walked right into the tank that was the strange man before the man’s attention was on Reid.</p><p>“Sveta?”</p><p>The man stood when Derek gave him a look – one he hoped communicated he didn’t know what a ‘Sveta’ was – and started towards him. When Reid walked out – in Derek’s sweats from his go-bag, still parked just beside her bedroom door from where he had brought it in when he realized this hangout was something a bit more serious and in an opaque t-shirt that covered something like scarring, surprising Derek that he had missed it. Maybe that was what bothered him, that he noticed something and was so easily distracted when she did that thing with her mouth – she rolled her eyes and scoffed at the man.</p><p>“Dima.”</p><p>He nodded. “Sveta.”</p><p>“Kofe?”</p><p>The two continued conversing in Russian, and she was oddly comfortable with him even if she had never told the team about a man named Dima.</p><p>“Kid, who is this?”</p><p>She shrugged at him. “Think of him like my brother.”</p><p>That was the only answer she gave, and when he asked her, two days later what that was supposed to mean she scoffed at him with that same look she gave Dima – the one that suggested he should have put it together already.</p><p>“Think of him like my brother. It means exactly what I said.”</p><p>*</p><p>They take a case of missing teenage girls. They all show up dead three to five days later, all with brands in their skin, but so poorly done that they couldn’t tell what they were supposed to be. Reid was on edge the entire time, but she was the one that said they were being branded while conscious, that it wouldn’t be so distorted if they had been unconscious when it was done, as they would have been far more still.</p><p>The cuts and bootmarks in the skin haunt Morgan in his dreams the next few nights, and he can’t figure out why it bothers him so much when he has seen so much worse. He ends up at Reid’s not long after they get back, just friends hanging out after a rough few days at work.</p><p>The perpetrator had been an older man, a successful businessman that didn’t fit the profile except he was the one that could entice these girls to show up by virtue of they were all in financial straits and needed any help they could get. Lured them in with money, did whatever it was he did to torture them, and then dumped their bodies.</p><p>He hadn’t dug too deep, let the others do that when he saw that edge in Reid’s eyes, the one that he had never seen before but that couldn’t bode well. Hotch had put him on making sure she didn’t do something stupid.</p><p>When he showed up at Reid’s, it didn’t matter that he told himself it was just friends hanging out. He knew he was there to do something stupid.</p><p>*</p><p>He didn’t expect the guy to show up in the middle of the night, much less to grab Spencer (Sveta, as he called her, and Morgan was pretty sure that was some sort of nickname) from the bed and mutter at her, again in Russian. Derek shot up and his hand went for where his bag (and gun) were.</p><p>“Derek don’t do it.” She glared at him as she picked clothes up off the floor, quickly dressed before Morgan’s brain had even really processed everything going on. “If you’re really itching for a fight, just come with.”</p><p>So he did. He wasn’t letting the strange guy, the guy who had disappeared for months if he wasn’t mistaken only to show back up in her apartment, who never said a damn word, that Reid was tense and on-edge with but also seemed to trust in some sense, at the very least. He took them to an honest-to-god warehouse, abandoned by the looks of it, and the understanding between the two of them seemed implicit. Reid had worked her hair into a tight, harsh ponytail before they got there, and as soon as doors were closed and they were far enough into the room to have some space the man lashed out to Reid.</p><p>Reid, ever the source of shocks, ducked the punch and the fight was on. Reid moved like a dancer, where Dima moved like he was looking to kill her and use his sheer brute force to do it. She didn’t let hits connect if she could avoid it, but when she took a hit she was calculated about it so she could keep the fight going.</p><p>It stopped when she pulled his own knife and held it against his throat. Once he stopped, she dropped him and stepped back. She was standing ramrod straight, her hands and arms tensed up like she was expecting the next fight to start any second now. She spat something in Russian at Dima, who was quick to draw his own knife before the fight was back on.</p><p>Reid didn’t look anything like the hapless nerd, the genius they all knew and loved. Instead she looked like a warrior, like a soldier.</p><p>Derek didn’t want to think about how they were going to explain the cuts and wounds on Reid – and she did take enough hits that he had to believe it would be obvious – but he found himself watching this second fight with intrigue. Reid’s results from all the firearms testing and physical testing suggested she shouldn’t have been able to do this, but the way she moved suggested she had more training than any of them, that she was faking them all out the entire time they knew her. Skills like these, he had to believe, would have helped her out of the situation with Hankel, but she had stayed. As bitter as that made him, given the worry when she was hurt in the line of duty, the profiler instinct kicked in, and he had to wonder what she was so intent on hiding from.</p><p>Dima moved like he knew how she was supposed to fight, but she moved like she was breaking every rule in the book. Slight hesitancy mixed with assurance when she was doing something she knew would work. Derek might not have known if he hadn’t caught it in a moment her hesitance was just a hair too long and she took a nasty hit to the sternum. Derek was fairly certain he heard something crack, but when Reid stood up and brushed it off like nothing happened he dismissed it. She could take care of herself.</p><p>Hopefully.</p><p>*</p><p>The community college near him offered Russian courses. He didn’t make any sort of deal about it, but Garcia was quick to interrogate him about his enrollment.</p><p>It wasn’t his place to say, he said, but he wanted to be able to understand something about a friend of his. He just hoped this was the right way to go about it.</p><p>He didn’t let on to Garcia about Reid, about what he saw so shortly before. All he knew was that she shouldn’t be walking and acting like she wasn’t hurt when she had been. He had seen some of the hits she had taken, and they should have had her recovering. No one recovered that fast except a select few of the ‘supers’ that New York seemed plagued by.</p><p>She rolled her eyes at him when he brought it up. She told him not to worry about it, filled up her coffee, and gone back to her desk. She laughed at something Prentiss said, she smiled at JJ, and she generally pretended to be the somewhat hapless, but nevertheless endearing genius they all knew her as. But he could see it, now he knew what to look for, in how her back was still steeled in a straight line, how she gripped her pen like she might need to switch it into a weapon at any given moment. The way she moved when she walked, with a grace her supposed klutz tendencies should have run counter to.</p><p>*</p><p>The next time he joined them at one of their late night training sessions, they roped him into the training after Dima had worked off some steam, and Spencer and Sveta, he learned, were two very different sides of the same coin. Where Spencer was pretty good at convincing everyone she wasn’t a threat, Sveta was a taskmaster and was a hard hitter when she wanted to be.</p><p>Morgan had never really worried about blocking his face in hand to hand, if only because he was so rarely using it and when he was usually against untrained criminals. He was never dropping his hands again if Sveta had something to say about that. When training wrapped up, around four in the morning, she was quick to drag him and Dima to a seedy diner, order something loaded with grease and protein for all of them, and then to grab them a table.</p><p>She and Dima were quick with their Russian, like it was never learned but assimilated. Derek put in when he could, though even with six months of Russian he could barely follow them.</p><p>
  <em>“What did you do to get away? This is the…” </em>
</p><p>He may have missed part of it, but that was certainly an interesting question. Dima had to get away from something to see them, not that he had a clue what it was. Sometimes, when they were with him, they would slow down for him. He learned a lot of Russian from them (given Dima started coming around a lot more often as time went on) than he did from his classes. He couldn’t necessarily read like he could talk, but he liked it all the same.</p><p>
  <em>“Steve. And then I killed my handler.” </em>
</p><p>She laughed at that, and it was something so uncharacteristic of Reid that it had to be Sveta and Sveta alone. Reid didn’t laugh about killing people, didn’t treat it so casually, not after all they’d seen.</p><p>“Wait, what?”</p><p>“Derek, there are some things you don’t need to worry about.”</p><p>She got tense after that, and more guarded.</p><p>*</p><p>He gets brought into their closer circle when, in the aftermath of a training session. Something in Sveta is off, and Dima seems to know because he swaps her coffee for tea and doesn’t speak to her but to Derek. Everything he’s saying is directed at her, but by saying it to Derek, he realizes, he is protecting her from having to engage in the conversation while whatever it is sorts itself.</p><p>“This isn’t the first time she’s had to sort this shit. She’ll be fine, and if not then I have a list of assholes and locations; I’m more than happy to help her blow off some steam.”</p><p>It’s ominous, and Derek is worried, again, about how casual they are about murder, when Reid is so against doing harm in their line of work.</p><p>It’s a cover. He can know that as much as he wants, but that doesn’t make it easier to reconcile the two.</p><p>*</p><p>Mr. Scratch happens, and he gets Hotch alone. Sveta makes her first appearance in front of the team. Ever since he got brought into their little inner circle, the lines between Spencer and Sveta have become both more clear to Derek and so much more blurred. Ever since he and Reid had semi-formally cemented their relationship as an actual romantic relationship and not just hook-ups, that line became even harder to see, as in the casual and non-professional she blended the two more than Derek ever expected.  </p><p>Turns out, he later learned, Dima was Bucky Barnes, brainwashed assassin best friend of Steve motherfucking Rogers, but she said he “pulled her out of the fire”, “finished her training”, and “left me in that damn shack in the middle of Siberia like the bastard he is”. These answers were all gotten on separate occasions, but they didn’t give any promising impressions as to what had happened between Reid and Dima when she was younger. They didn’t give a positive impression, either, about her childhood. Somehow, though, she fooled all of them (even Gideon, if Derek wasn’t mistaken) into thinking she had lived her entire childhood with her parents and had documents to prove it. Espionage training, if the history of Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier was anything to go off of.</p><p>Sveta, in the case of Mr. Scratch, comes out in the subtle tension in Reid’s face, in the way her shoulders square in the car, while they’re in transit, when she realizes what’s going on inside the house, what Scratch has probably done to Hotch. She doesn’t put any tactical gear on, doesn’t even take her gun in with her, just heads straight in. Derek can know that it is because she doesn’t feel there is time to wait for the backup they called for, but that doesn’t stop him from reacting with the others to try and stop her. Morgan has learned the bare minimum about what kind of training she had, but he has to guess she is intending to subdue not to kill. Even so, Hotch has a gun and she doesn’t, and has been put under the strain of drugs to make him suggestible; he very well may try to kill her once she gets in there. She breaks their grips, though, and she goes in without them, as they speed up throwing their gear on.  </p><p>She could kill if she wanted, he knows. Has seen that coldness in her eyes when she manages to get the drop on Dima, as rarely as it happens. The first time he saw it, evidently, was a fluke of sorts. SHIELD had just dumped the files, Dima was shaky on his feet at best and had no clue, at worst, what he was going to be able to do about living a life separate from Hydra and the brainwashing. Going to Sveta, whom he had crossed paths with that day and who had lodged in his head as a ‘mission objective’, had been his way of trying to sort out how he felt about all of this.</p><p>He had seen that coldness in her eyes before, on cases. Only for a moment and always quickly concealed, but he knows that Sveta, whatever happened to her, Spencer knows how to kill. More than that, Spencer is comfortable in that knowledge, and comfortable with that ability in ways that make Derek decidedly uncomfortable when he thinks about it for too long.</p><p>She is in the house long before they’re starting to follow her. His only solace is knowing that not once has she gone cold like that before entering the house, not once has she crossed into that territory. She had gone in with purpose, and by the time Morgan and the others are in and able to see her she is fighting Hotch with that ease and grace that she always had with Dima, but because Hotch doesn’t have that same training, he is quick to fall, and the gun is quickly in Reid’s hands, Reid turning it on Lewis and there is that chill, that posture and that rigidness. She doesn’t even come close to missing the shot. The bullet is between his eyes before they’ve caught up to her and gotten a hold on Hotch, and Lewis is no longer an issue.</p><p>Morgan has seen her, in the morning most often, when the past catches up. He knows she won’t respond well if he tries to reason with her or calm her down. Hell, she might not even respond well to just hearing English.</p><p>He dials up Dima, instead, who quickly gives orders in grainy, phone-distorted Russian, and that rigidness remains in her posture, but she goes with them quietly and is quick to fill out the necessary report.</p><p>They don’t know what to do about what was clearly an excessive use of force, not until Hotch and Strauss – after arguing quietly and bringing Sveta, still Sveta as she has been since the afternoon, in Hotch’s office – come in with an answer. A stickler for rules, most of the time, he said to deal with it carefully. They passed it off as concern that the chemical used on Hotch may still be in the air, that she was trying to prevent Lewis from turning her on her teammates along with Hotch.</p><p>*</p><p>JJ and Emily don’t know what to do, and they go to Derek to find out what he did about it.</p><p>“I don’t ask about it. Whatever it is she’s dealing with, she shares when she’s ready.”</p><p>“But she killed Lewis, and she didn’t even blink. And you saw her fighting Hotch. She’s been hiding this from us for how long?”</p><p>“Where do you think someone like Reid learns stuff like that?” Morgan shrugged. It had hurt, in the beginning, but he had also been there for training and seen that punching each other and scowling when injured was how Reid had learned to deal with her problems. She ignored them and assimilated them into her existence and let them rest. She didn’t talk, she didn’t share.</p><p>Sharing was something she had been trying to learn for years. Morgan had assumed it was because she had raised herself, Dima had clarified it was because whoever had done the raising, emotions and emotional health was something that was never even considered.</p><p>JJ and Emily take what he has to say and consider it, but he notices that they put space between themselves and Reid. He aches for her, but she doesn’t let on the slightest bit of change.</p><p>Then again, he watched her get cut in the side and go to work like nothing hurt, not even a change in her gait to imply she was in pain.</p><p>*</p><p>When Hotch calls for her to recertify on everything, she holds back and Morgan can see it. Three times, she had Hotch, who was running the tests on the down-low, in holds that she could have dislocated a shoulder, broken a wrist, and once he could see her training demanding she use the heel of her shoe to bash his skull in, but her rationale was telling her to hold back and not kill anyone today. Mixed messages, mixed identities, and she has some screw-ups in there he knows Dima would have exploited and then beaten out of her in continued sparring matches.</p><p>Dima showed up that night and there was a small homemade meal and the two of them sitting in silence with a communication of scowls and scoffs between them. She didn’t answer to Spencer that night, only to Sveta.</p><p>The marksmanship goes similarly. She hits the target point on without a single miss, knowing that Hotch will call her on it, even if he didn’t know enough to call her on holding back in the hand-to-hand, and she comes back and has to deal with the pressure alone.</p><p>Not entirely alone. While Dima is away that night and cannot come, Morgan is there and he cooks that night. Food she eats robotically, not tasting it at all. That night, he realizes whatever this trauma is runs deeper than he had ever really anticipated. He asks himself what he expected, given she never talked about it, not to her friends. She didn’t see a counselor, either, meaning she probably never dealt with it, not really. She had taken it in stride, had moved on through it, but she had never dealt with it. She pulls handcuffs out, clearly still on autopilot, and handcuffs one wrist to the bed.</p><p>She sleeps completely still, is asleep in moments, and Derek doesn’t push it until the morning.</p><p>He wishes he hadn’t, when she shuts down completely. He wishes he had told Hotch to leave it the hell alone, when he had pushed for her retesting.</p><p>*</p><p>Dima shows up in the office after that. Derek doesn’t know how Dima knows to show up, knows when Spencer need him, but he’s waiting in Hotch’s office. Unarmed, but Derek is painfully aware that he and Spencer don’t need weapons to do serious damage.</p><p>“Spence.” JJ gives her a look, no doubt seeing the similarities in their carriage. “You know anything about this?”</p><p>“I don’t know why he’s here,” she turns away from JJ before muttering in Russian under her breath. <em>“But I’ll be damned if I don’t at least bruise a few ribs or get a good cut in at his face for it.” </em></p><p>Prentiss gives Morgan a look for huffing something close to a laugh at what she said, and yeah. Maybe it was inappropriate, but he has also spent enough time with them to know that not only was it a legitimate threat, but that Dima would probably be so damn proud of her if she managed it.</p><p>Garcia is the one to break the news – she had been brought in at one point to help dig into the background of the Winter Soldier – that Dima has bullied his way to redeeming himself at the BAU because “Sveta has no survival instinct, and I’m not letting those years of beating the knowledge into her go to waste.”</p><p>Derek has seen, by now, a few of her scars. Glimpses here and there, and that she trusts Dima so much despite him causing some of those scars says something about whoever it was that caused the others.</p><p>Bucky Barnes picks up profiling quickly, and he mentions that he had to learn how to be, in some ways, like these killers so figuring out how they think isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Derek is quick to catch on that that is precisely why, despite her act as a hapless nerd, despite the lack of social skills, Sveta/Spencer caught onto it so quickly and got so good for being so immersed in physical sciences. She is more Sveta at work, now that Dima (Bucky, his work brain supplies) is there. Sure, she answers to Spencer or Reid as much as Dima answers to James or Barnes, but the two of them consistently use their Russian monikers for one another, and they almost always run ideas by one another in Russian without even thinking about it.</p><p>It leads to tension with LEO’s and local police departments when it gets in the way of communicating with them, and the two are banned from Russian in the field unless absolutely necessary.</p><p>Hotch, Sveta, and Dima don’t know how to get along with one another in person, but they eventually find a professional equilibrium. Derek has to wonder how that must be on Sveta. She hasn’t let on, but she does love her job and she sees the team as a family of sorts, as much as she may not have the best experience with the concept. She, no doubt, had some thoughts on the loss of esteem with someone she considered so close.</p><p>*</p><p>It happens at a team drinking night, when Barnes and Reid, and there is no doubt it is there more normal personas, have had enough alcohol for at least two people. Reid isn’t stumbling, yet, but she is slurring her words somewhat. Barnes is quick to pretend he’s fine, but he really isn’t and it’s fucking hilarious.</p><p>Prentiss looks at Reid and finally asks a question Morgan is pretty sure she’s been biting down for a long time. “How did you two even meet?”</p><p>Dima laughs. “She nearly burnt with the Red Room in ’89.”</p><p>“Fuck William.”</p><p>And when Dima returns the toast, there is no doubt that the grudge against Reid’s father is shared, and for Derek it clues him in that her father has something to do with her ending up in the Red Room.</p><p>And now that he has a name, he uses the time to look into the files available on the Red Room. Sveta gives him a look for it, but when he asks if she minds she just laughs. “Not at all.”</p><p>She doesn’t lie, that’s one thing he’s learned. Not to him or the team, not about things since she was fifteen. Past that, it gets a bit murky and she is tight-lipped about her past.</p><p>There isn’t much that he can find easily on the Red Room, and he decides to put the search off for a few days before attacking it again from a different angle.</p><p>*</p><p>Garcia hands him information about the Red Room. “I asked, she said it was okay if she didn’t have to talk about it after. The rest of the team has it, too.”</p><p>And the information inside is a little terrifying. Little girls, sold by their parents from across the world, and then put into a situation where they had killed someone before the age of seven. Reid’s first kill was six months after she showed up, when she was barely six. Reid doesn’t talk about the Red Room. JJ softens up around her, and works her way back into the picture when she realizes Reid isn’t hiding from them on purpose. Reid allows her in with the same distance she had maintained with everyone beforehand. JJ confides in Derek that she is still uncomfortable with the idea, but that she also couldn’t help but imagine Reid so young and in such a hard environment. She swallows her discomfort to comfort Reid in at least some way, she tells him, because she can’t bear to think she might be punishing Reid for the actions of others, might be extending the hurt she’s suffered at the hands of others.</p><p>It’s Emily that tries to crack jokes, and it gets through to Reid, to Sveta, in a way that Dima and Derek were some of the only ones. When Derek thinks about it later, after Sveta has put dinner on the table and used one of Dima’s hunting knives to cut her food because only two were clean and she wasn’t going to make them go without when she could adapt – a habit she seemed to have gotten <em>from</em> Dima – he realizes it’s because the jokes normalize it. They normalize that she is an assassin in a way that merely accepting and keeping quiet on the issue doesn’t. She doesn’t have to dwell on all she missed out on if she acts like it is the most normal thing in the world. Dima, similarly, copes through humor. He also pretends nothing is wrong with what happened to him, and it’s something they share a long history of.</p><p>Derek’s learned that a lot of Reid’s bad habits can be blamed on Dima, and if Derek wants to marry her (he puts aside the fact this thought has been coming up more and more often with regards to Reid) he has to deal with his pseudo-brother-in-law being a terrible influence.</p><p>It’s Rossi that gets them all, though. On the plane, flying back and looking over the Red Room information again, looking at the training regime, if Derek isn’t wrong, he looks over to Sveta.</p><p>“So if they trained you for undercover work, are your social skills better than you’ve let on?”</p><p>“No. They’re worse.” Sveta doesn’t even look up.</p><p>Emily laughs, Derek shakes his head, smiling a bit at that before tacking on, “Put her and Barnes in a room and turn the topic to their emotions and watch how fast they turn tail and run.”</p><p>Barnes throws a pen at Derek with the kind of accuracy that reminds Derek that if it were one of his way-too-many knives, he would be dead right now.</p><p>Since when was his life this dangerous-by-association?</p><p>*</p><p>Dima and Sveta disappear in the middle of the night. Derek doesn’t even wake up, doesn’t even process anything is wrong until he sees a note tucked away in a pocket of his go-bag in Russian reading they had something that needed resolved. He assumes it has to do with Hydra, with the Red Room, but he doesn’t try to find out. He lets Strauss and Hotch know something’s up. Strauss says they have a week before she writes them off as missing-in-action. Hotch gets a look in his eye that comes out more and more often with regards to Reid.</p><p>It’s one that says she’s pushing him in a way he doesn’t want to be pushed, and she’s lucky he’s been tolerating it for so long.</p><p>*</p><p>They have another case with girls disappearing and showing up scarred. This time, it’s across the country from the first which makes them dismiss the possibility of a copycat. By the time they think they’ve found the perpetrator, the man (and someone a little digging reveals to be one of at least two accomplices, the other one long gone) shows up dead in front of the police station. They all try to find the killer, but Morgan recognizes something in it – in the way the slaughter was done for sheer efficiency, not for any personal satisfaction. There is no overkill, nothing other than the knife wound in the perpetrator and the single gunshot to the accomplice’s head – that this was Reid and Dima.</p><p>*</p><p>Three weeks go by. She shows up in their shared apartment (something that had happened without him realizing it, and that he only really processed when it was empty of his girlfriend and her ‘brother’) when he has some of the team over, and her showing up consists of her falling from the roof and grabbing the fire escape on her way down. She probably dislocated or injured something, but they live high enough up that there wasn’t the speed to completely destroy her arm as she grabbed it.</p><p>The thud is what gets their attention, followed by the pull onto the fire escape as someone grabs her and tries to throw her over again, only for their face to be introduced to her elbow, followed by an introduction of a hidden knife to their throat. Garcia gasps at the sight of the blood spray, and the others tense up like they’re about to go toe-to-toe with an UNSUB. Morgan tenses up, and he realizes he has never had to face, head-on, the way her past had made her comfortable with death and gore. Had made her comfortable and desensitized to the kinds of acts she was trained to commit against others. She was a trained assassin, she was trained to kill, and she never forgot or forwent that training.</p><p>She has that look in her eye, that cold one. And based on the fact that she switches to the next guy without a blink he has to assume she’s been existing in that frame for a while now. Whatever they had to take care of, it was a threat to her life, and she had left to protect him and the team. Hotch, who admitted in her absence that his memory of their own tussle is vague, but the bruises left put him in a position of hesitancy in trusting her, is watching her fight in the cramped space on a fire escape like she has done it before. Something is clicking in his eyes, and Morgan wonders if its bringing back impressions from their own fight. From her retesting, even, he wonders.</p><p>She takes a hit to her eye, and a man is quick to grab her throat, but Derek and the others can’t do much but watch. To fire their weapons would risk hitting Reid – they don’t have her marksmanship. The helplessness pisses him off, and JJ and Emily are trying to get Garcia to look away while Rossi and Hotch are watching. None of them, though, feel like they have a right to look away. Morgan wonders if it comes from the fact all of them, even him, had judged her. It wasn’t serious, it was unavoidable in some senses, but they had. He remembered conversations, ones he never wanted to have near her because the logical part of him knew that she hadn’t asked for this, where they questioned her reasons for hiding, for not running away from the Red Room (even if they knew how untenable that was), where her loyalty was questioned.</p><p>She takes a knife to the shoulder and to the stomach to get away before she throws fingers in a guy’s eyes and then pushes him off. The last of the five men she had to fight backs up, misjudges the distance, and she uses that to her advantage to push him off, too. They’re probably dead on the ground, and Reid disappears down the stairs.</p><p>She’s probably getting rid of evidence, because that was part of her training. Leave nothing behind, make it look like some kind of drug deal gone wrong, or a fight between criminals. Make people look the other way.</p><p>*</p><p>She knocks on the door. She is asking, he knows, if she is still welcome. Hotch is the one to open the door, and JJ is immediately on her with first aid materials. JJ tries to help, but Reid just scowls at the gauze, taking the suture kit she had added to hers and Morgan’s first aide kit and is quick to take care of her injuries herself. She looks like shit – like she hasn’t been eating regularly and like she hasn’t slept a whole night in at least a week.</p><p>JJ makes tea instead. Emily asks her a few questions, looks in her eyes, and lets her know it doesn’t look like she has any sort of concussion. Derek has already called Dima, only to meet voicemail.</p><p>“He won’t pick up. Steve nabbed him back in New York, and he figured he would stay a while.”</p><p>Strauss gets a text from Rossi – and Derek pretends he didn’t notice, but they all know about Rossi and Strauss, and Blake introduces herself to the elusive missing member. The same one that Strauss always says is liable to be cut from the team completely if she doesn’t show up soon, but whom she has never met. Blake had come on half a week after Reid disappeared, as scheduled, and had done a good job pretending she wasn’t put out by not meeting the fellow academician on the team.</p><p>“Did you all tell her anything?”</p><p>Blake was worried about Reid, but also a tad fearful. Reid picked up on it in seconds, and their denial to having revealed anything makes her scowl again. Spending too much time with Dima, and she’s become more and more of Sveta less and less of Spencer.</p><p>“My dad sold me to the Red Room when I was a child, and the Winter Soldier raised me when he wasn’t iced after that. The Russian government found me at 15, when I was returned to the United States.”</p><p>It is the most information they’ve ever gotten from her on her past, and when Derek asks her later, all she says is “It can’t be used against me if people think I’m not ashamed of it.”</p><p>She still has never mentioned the scars, never explained them. But, he considers, Derek has never asked.</p><p>*</p><p>She dives into a cold lake after a victim an unsub has tried to drown. She comes back up, the rope holding the victim down cut and Blake is quick to help Reid strip down and get into something dry, despite the immediate cold.</p><p>That’s when Derek sees, for the first time (and with Hotch, Rossi, and Emily), the full extent of the scarring on her body. There are stab wounds, there are old, long-scarred cuts, there are bullet wounds. On her right hip, there is an old branding wound. The number 13 branded into her lower-left hip and it sticks in Derek’s head long after it gets covered by a bulky sweater emblazoned with <em>FBI </em>across the chest that is almost large enough to be a dress. Derek should probably be more concerned that his girlfriend is so slight she doesn’t fill out the sweater much at all, but all he can think of is the case where she had been so cavalier about branding.</p><p>
  <em>It wouldn’t be this bad if they weren’t moving. If they had been unconscious. </em>
</p><p>It says something that, in all the times they’ve been intimate, she has kept his attention so far from her scars that he never even really noticed the brand. He could remember feeling it under his hands, but every time he went to look at it the memory of it was out of his head, her lips pulling him up and her hand moving his from it. She was good at that, at distracting him from the scars on her body. And at waking up to dress before he would see them in the morning, leaving them something he was vaguely aware of but not enough he tried to see them.</p><p>She had other scars, too. Ones that wrapped across her torso like she had taken a knife, ones that were on her side and into her back like she had been beaten, ones that looked like the imprint of a heavy boot breaking the skin.</p><p>He had never thought about it, what it meant for Reid that she was raised so separately from the reality the rest of her friends had. Sure, they had known hardship. Morgan knew more than enough to assert that there was no comparing the struggles between people, that there were problems and struggles across their lives that would make the others balk and that it was best left that they acknowledge the struggles they all had.</p><p>But Reid hadn’t even been allowed the solace of knowing it would end. She had been sent to the Red Room, ostensibly until she died or was no longer of use to them.</p><p>If he thought about that too long, he would get angrier than he had any right to be about her past, and they were working through other problems right now, problems Reid didn’t want to address, necessarily, as she wanted to put it behind her. When they get home, the atmosphere is as cold as it’s been since she returned, and Morgan can’t help it.</p><p>“What was so important you couldn’t ask for help, kid?”</p><p>“It isn’t important, not anymore.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”</p><p>“We watched you kill five people outside this apartment. At the very least <em>I</em> deserve an explanation.”</p><p>“And what kind of explanation are you after? You want to know how I knew the Red Room was stalking me, getting ready to make a move? Or do you want to know why I never put it aside permanently?</p><p>“Or is this about my scars? Not pretty enough for you, all scarred and battered? Well, that’s fine. Say the word and I’ll leave.”</p><p>“Reid, you hold me at arms’ length.” He hasn’t put these words to it, has tried to ignore it the whole time they’ve been together, but he is getting more and more serious about her and he is very close to proposing, but he can’t do that if she isn’t willing to trust him. “Please, just trust me with this. Let me help you.”</p><p>She looks paralyzed, it is the first time he’s ever seen her fearful. The first time she has ever looked so close to tears, to something approaching talking about what happened. It was almost terrifying to see, to see her so afraid, so worried about it.</p><p>She sits down, and Derek sits by her. Whatever she’s about to say, she’s going to need support. As angry as he is, he is not about to deny her that.</p><p>“I was five years old.”</p><p>*</p><p>It goes like this. William and Diana were having problems, and a child didn’t help. William wanted to leave, wanted a divorce, but he didn’t want to deal with a child. It was the eighties, it was easy to hide and fake a death, and when the woman, <em>the ballet teacher </em>as Reid calls her, approached William it took three meetings to convince him to sell his own daughter. William, she says, has never spoken to her since her return. Does not look her in the eyes.</p><p>She is taken to Russia after that, and her voice shakes as she talks about the cold – a terrible contrast between the world she knew of Las Vegas and her new ‘home’.</p><p>The Red Room is a complex of buildings in the middle of the woods, isolated from the broader populace. She had seen Soviet leaders, KGB leaders, in her time there when they came to survey and check on what they were pouring so much money into. She is six when she is done the inductive training, and when they make her take the first life. She kills her roommate, because when she tries to spare her the roommate uses that against her and nearly slits her throat.</p><p>That is the first time Derek nearly asks her to stop, because it occurs to him that she would have died with no one knowing how or when or where, and he has to wonder how some of their cases would have turned out without her by their side. And that’s a small part of the equation.</p><p>The training from there involves ballet so they can hide in plain sight, involves weapons training. She is eight years old when she learns what it feels like to be shot, and she tells him about the mission it happened on. Her first solo mission, and it was accepted that she was going to get hurt and there was a significant chance she would die. She talks about it plainly, cavalier almost in how calm she is, but Derek can feel the shake in her hands. She was in Oslo and killing a politician causing problems for the Red Room and its overseers; she was nine years old, using her child face to lure him into privacy but his bodyguard had met the Red Room before, recognized something odd in her. He is the one to shoot her – in the abdomen. She managed to kill the politician, and the bodyguard pursued her while she tried to ignore the heat and pain in her side and Derek can only imagine the fear she felt. He knows she was a killer, is capable of just as easily being a killer, but he can only see a fearful child like the ones she has helped save countless of.</p><p>At nine years old, the word whips around the Red Room. Natalia, number eight from class three and the model for Reid’s own class, has gone rogue. Dima, the name the Red Room told them to use for the Winter Soldier as he worked on training them in combat, snaps. He grabs her and runs with her, stashing her in a bolthole in the middle of Siberia. He is with her four days, continues training her, and teaches her to survive in the wilderness, before he disappears.</p><p>He comes back when she is eleven, and Morgan is suddenly aware of all the times she has looked nearly gaunt in her thinness. He wonders if she goes without food for so long so easily from a long history of practice.</p><p>It is at thirteen that she is found by Russian authorities. The Soviet Union has collapsed, the Russian Federation is now the authority in the region, not that it means much to a thirteen-year-old who assumes she is to be used as a weapon. The leader takes pity on her, sends her back to the States when they manage to track down her identity in the old files. She is tested for high school to be found that the academics of the Red Room leave high school as pointless for her, and she ends up in university and under the care of her mother.</p><p>Reid is careful, always cautious.</p><p>By the time he catches up to fifteen – the last time for many years she would see Dima – she admits that she killed one person at fifteen, one person before her time in the FBI. She got through the clearance process for the job by lying through her teeth with the training from the Red Room, she answers when prompted.</p><p>It was a TA in college. He had been assaulting girls for a while, before he turned his eyes on the skinny and quiet fifteen-year-old. His body was found one state over, but anything to identify him was broken or cut away and disposed of. “He’s still considered missing. I feel bad for his mother, but he was hurting people, I still didn’t know how to handle that without violence; authorities were not ones to trust, that was what I had been taught.”</p><p>Dima was the one that found her carrying the body to get rid of it. He drove her over the state line, helped her dispose of it, helped her back and helped her clean. He disappeared a few days later, and he only showed up again to congratulate her on being tapped for the FBI.</p><p>“My cover came from a dare. When he was away from Hydra long enough, he began to see things in his way, and he liked to make jokes and have dares.”</p><p>The next time was when she made it in, with the incompetency she pretended. She saw him sporadically until he left Hydra permanently.</p><p>“We left because the Red Room was circling in on me. The organization was mostly destroyed, but there were a few leaders, factions, those kinds that got away. Natalia is good, too good, but they were the ones that trained her, and they were more than willing to use what they knew about her thinking and her methods to hide themselves from her.”</p><p>She doesn’t speak after she wraps up her tale of woe. She falls asleep on the couch, and Morgan carries her to their bed. She trusted him, trusted him with so much that night.</p><p>There would be time to heal if they worked through things over time. Things were laid bare, now. They just needed time.</p><p>*</p><p>When Derek asks her, months later, to marry him, she nearly attacks him with her mouth. He laughs at her enthusiasm, and he understands that some of it comes from the aspect of commitment. She does commitment in a way few people do. She is the epitome of the phrase ‘ride or die’, but instead of die it is clear to the rest of the team, with time, that she would easily and quickly kill for them.</p><p>Peter Lewis stands out as an example of that.</p><p>The wedding ends up being private, being something between just them, Morgan’s family, the team, and Dima. Dima asks to bring Steve, and Sveta says something about not wanting sanctimonious All-American Boys at her wedding, but that he can come to the reception. Dima smiles about that, at that, and laughs with her at the reception when they watch the supersoldier try to relate to her teammates and husband when their lives and times were so very different. The event, however, leaves no doubt in Derek as to having made the right choice. It is, in the manner of the old cliché, the beginning of the rest of their lives.</p><p>Reid, Sveta, she makes him smile when they get home so very tired. She makes him laugh when they start to debate moving from the couch and changing out of their wedding clothes.</p><p>Life isn’t easy, not forever. There are arguments, fights, words said. But it was a promising start to life together.</p>
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